Last week was the end of the Google Summer or Code season. Out of two projects
that we had been mentoring one was not really about biology. It was a project
for system administrators. A visualization tool for staistics about
cpu usage, memory, disk space etc.

Everybody who runs involved biodiversity informatics projects knows how
important it is to monitor your systems. There are several open source tools
for that – Nagios, Sensu, Graphite, Systemd, Collectd…

Our monitoring system of choice is Sensu. It is very flexible and powerful
tool, well designed and suitable for large number of tasks. One of these is
collecting statistics from computers and store them in about any kind of
database. As a result Sensu can be used for monitoring critical events and for
collecting data about systems. The question is however how to visualize all the
collected data.

We designed Sysopia to do exactly that. During the summer @vpowerrc
expanded original prototype and created powerful and flexible visualization
tool which is capable to give system administrator an understanding what is
happening with 2-20 computers at a glance, receive life updates, and compare
today’s statistics with up to one year of data. We already use Sysopia in
production, and we are going to deploy it for Global Names as soon as our
new computers are in place.